Charlotte Is Just the Latest City to Explode. There Will Be Others.

Lost in all the noise and heartbreak down in Charlotte on Tuesday night, the Supreme Judicial Court up here in the Commonwealth (God save it!) handed down a decision which should have resonated through the day's events more loudly than it did.

(Brief Historical Note: The highest court in Massachusetts is called the Supreme Judicial Court to distinguish it from the state legislature, which is called The General Court. Aren't we just adorable? Have you seen our pilgrim hats? Now let me tell you about the Governor's Council.)

On Tuesday, the SJC ruled on the case of a guy named Jimmy Warren, who'd been convicted of unlawful possession of a weapon back in 2011. Warren had been arrested when Boston police tried to stop him and a friend near the site of a burglary, and Warren and his companion took off running. Eventually, they were caught and searched. No weapon was found on Warren, but a .22 was discovered in a nearby yard. That led to Warren's conviction on the gun charge.

The SJC threw out the conviction. It said that the police had had no right to stop Warren in the first place. And then the court went further than that. Per WBUR:

On the second point, the court noted that state law gives individuals the right to not speak to police and even walk away if they aren't charged with anything. The court said when an individual does flee, the action doesn't necessarily mean the person is guilty. And when it comes to black men, the BPD and ACLU reports "documenting a pattern of racial profiling of black males in the city of Boston" must be taken into consideration, the court said. "We do not eliminate flight as a factor in the reasonable suspicion analysis whenever a black male is the subject of an investigatory stop. However, in such circumstances, flight is not necessarily probative of a suspect's state of mind or consciousness of guilt. Rather, the finding that black males in Boston are disproportionately and repeatedly targeted for FIO [Field Interrogation and Observation] encounters suggests a reason for flight totally unrelated to consciousness of guilt. Such an individual, when approached by the police, might just as easily be motivated by the desire to avoid the recurring indignity of being racially profiled as by the desire to hide criminal activity. Given this reality for black males in the city of Boston, a judge should, in appropriate cases, consider the report's findings in weighing flight as a factor in the reasonable suspicion calculus."

The SJC then went into a deep dive into the data that proved that minority residents of the city were far more likely to be profiled without cause. In other words, Black Lives Matter, at least as far as the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts is concerned.

The police shootings in Tulsa and in Charlotte were bad ones. The killing of Terence Crutcher in Oklahoma seems particularly egregious; it seems to have been based on the unreasoning fear of a single police officer, who doesn't seem especially stable herself. Via ABC:

Crutcher did not respond, Wood said, so Shelby ordered him again to get his hand out of his pocket. He then pulled his hand away and put his hands up in the air, even though he was not instructed to do so, which Shelby found strange, Wood said.

The hell? Having your hands up while black is now a signal that you're up to no good? That you need to be tased and shot? I mean, seriously, what the hell is the problem with this cop?

The case of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte seems more ambiguous, but not by much. Again, we hear that Scott "refused to comply" with orders. The police then claimed that Scott came after them with a gun. His family said it was a book. The police said they'd found a gun at the scene but no book. The footage from the officers' respective body-cameras might clear that all up but, as NBC News reminds us, a recently passed law in the newly-insane state of North Carolina has made it more difficult to get access to such footage.

The new state law signed in July no longer classifies bodycam and dashcam video as police personnel — but it also doesn't consider it public record. Once the legislation goes into effect next month, that means only a judge can decide to make the video available publicly. Otherwise, a person who appears or is heard in the footage can request to view it with police consent — but not make personal copies. If they are denied, they can get permission from a court. A judge could permit people who aren't in the video to watch the footage, although it can't violate seven conditions under the law, such as that doing so would put people at risk.

To the surprise of approximately nobody, the law was the brainchild of Governor Pat McCrory and his Art Pope sublets in the North Carolina legislature, all of whom have worked assiduously to demolish whatever once made North Carolina different from much of the South. Most recently, of course, McCrory has blown up the state's tourist economy by gluing his head to North Carolina's anti-trans law.

As the demand for police body-cams rose in the aftermath of other controversial police killings, McCrory threw himself into the task of defanging the law in North Carolina.

Gov. Pat McCrory, however, argued that it would better protect public safety officials, particularly after a string of high-profile shootings involving law enforcement. "It's better to have rules and guidelines with all this technology than no rules and guidelines whatsoever," McCrory said at the time.

So, over the past couple of nights, Charlotte has exploded the way that several other cities have exploded in the wake of similar incidents. McCrory, who is facing a tough re-election battle in November, has declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard. There is now the usual debate about the sources of anger and about how violence is never the answer and everyone's retreated behind their familiar battlements. But we should look for a moment at the original incident that has touched off the events of the past two nights, as described by CBS News.

On Tuesday, Putney said officers were executing a search for a man with outstanding warrants when they witnessed Scott get into a car with a handgun. Scott was not the man they were looking for, but police engaged him when he then got out of and back into the car with the gun, Putney said. Officers approached Scott and gave him multiple warnings to drop the weapon, Putney said. Scott then attempted to get out of the vehicle with the gun in his hand, which is when he was shot by Officer Brentley Vinson, who is black and has been placed on administrative leave, as is standard procedure in such cases. Vinson has been with the department for two years.

OK, so the police knew that Scott wasn't the man whom they'd come to arrest. He was just a citizen of North Carolina who was getting in and out of his car with a gun. Now, North Carolina is an open-carry state. So, under the law, at the time the police confronted him, Scott had broken no law whatsoever, and he wasn't the person the police were looking for. In theory, anyway, under the doctrine of equal protection, the police should have looked at Scott and been on their way. For example, here's some video of guys from Asheville who need to be packing because it is cold and windy outside. There also is a police officer interviewed. He does not appear to be frightened. He does not shoot any of them.

The riposte of the gun-fondling community to people who point out that Scott had broken no law at the time he was confronted by police is to accuse Scott of "brandishing" his weapon. No, really. That's the argument. Again, the body-camera footage might give us a definitive answer to that question but, of course, we can't see that footage at the moment. But it does give us an indication of the dilemma faced by open-carry zealots. So much of the political appeal of these laws is based on an unreasoning fear of The Other that guaranteeing all citizens the equal protection of open-carry laws doubles the perceived threat. If all of this absurdity reminds you of how, back in 1967, everybody in California loved their Second Amendment freedoms until the Black Panthers showed up in Sacramento to exercise theirs, then you're not alone.

Even Donald Trump, who once stupidly contended that Hillary Rodham Clinton would abolish the Second Amendment but who now stupidly contends that she will "virtually" do it, seems unable to think his way out of this particular paper bag. Recently, he mused that he might be in favor of adopting a national stop-and-frisk policy. He thereupon explained his quasi-thought process to his favorite finger-puppet, Sean Hannity. On Wednesday, he said he meant that the policy should only apply in Chicago. This is what he said:

"You know, [the police are] proactive and if they see a person possibly with a gun or they think may have a gun, they will see the person and they'll look and they'll take the gun away," Trump said.

In sum, then, Terence Clutcher is dead because he put up his hands in a way that a police officer thought "odd," and Keith Scott is dead because police say he had a gun in his hand in a way that police say they thought threatening. Pending release of the body-cam videos in Charlotte, equal protection of the laws is an incoherent farce in both cases. And people are in the streets being angry and violent, which is almost never productive and which is presented to the nation devoid of context as just another exciting installment of the ongoing miniseries called Cable News.

But if justice is rendered a farce, an empty promise, another worthless promissory note, then what is there to do? The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts tried to find a way, but then everything went to hell on TV again.

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